A member of staff at Skolkovo startup Promobot, which makes friendly talking robots, has used one of the company’s creations to ask his girlfriend to marry him. To the relief of all the coworkers – and robots – gathered around watching, she said yes.
Video: Promobot.
Ivan Gromov, who works assembling robots at the company’s Perm headquarters, invited his girlfriend to visit him at the production line, where one of his creations – a Promobot v.4 – rolled forward into a circle of candles and petals carrying a bunch of roses to say: “Venerochka, marry him!”
Ivan and Venera, a police investigator, met two years ago through friends, according to Promobot. The idea of involving a robot in his marriage proposal occurred to Ivan one day at work, the company said, adding that he had planned it all and asked his colleagues to customize the robot and help him set it all up. The couple now plans to get married on August 17. It was not immediately clear whether a Promobot might take part in the wedding ceremony.
This is not the first time that Skolkovo technology has been used for romance. In 2016, a man in the northern city of Arkhangelsk used a medical exoskeleton made by Skolkovo resident ExoAtlet to walk down the aisle for his own wedding, after an accident nearly a decade earlier left him unable to walk on his own.